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Hotels that Help You Cheat
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Today's finest hotels and restaurants work hard to accommodate their guests' dalliances. Sara Reistad-Long investigates the secret tricks that keep philanderers one step ahead of their spouses. Plus, the best places to cheat.
There are perks rich people enjoy—chauffeurs, life coaches, puppy au pairs—that they consider essential to their well-being, and for some, “cheating assistant” is high on the list. Because when you’re paying top-dollar for a penthouse hotel room or a corner banquette at a luxury restaurant, the establishment’s staff should know enough not to call your wife by your mistresses’ name.
To ensure this, the owners and managers of the world’s most exclusive restaurants and hotels pull out all the stops to make sure their best customers can conduct their affairs there with ease. “I had a regular customer who, on the same day, brought his mistress in for lunch, and his wife for dinner,” says Jean-Luc Le Du, an award-winning wine professional (now owner of Le Du’s Wines) who spent 10 years running the wine program at Daniel, celebrity chef Daniel Boulud’s four-star Manhattan flagship. “The expectation was that we wouldn’t even blink. That probably protected him better than anything.”
“Our policy was to keep what we referred to as a client ‘résumé’ on file. On it, we’d have any information we deemed relevant to making the stay seamless and comfortable for all.”
You could say it takes a village to cheat. Michael Greenlee, who until 2007 was the wine director at Gotham Bar and Grill, another New York restaurant known for its VIP regulars, says this is what clients are paying for. “There are a handful of really top-tier establishments that come with a service standard where all the t’s are crossed and all the i’s are dotted. Part of the package is to offer a very comfortable, safe place for the customer to do business, whatever that business might be.”
How do they do it? Like they do everything at these establishments: with flawless technique and artistry. The Daily Beast spoke to some of the country’s top restaurateurs and hoteliers about keeping adulterous guests under the radar.
Scour for Up-To-Date Information about Your Clients
To this day, Julian Niccolini, the co-owner of New York’s Four Seasons restaurant, spends his mornings scouring, clipping, and saving newspaper articles containing information that might be relevant to his top clients’ behaviors. Nor does his attention to detail end there: “I've had to juggle a wife and husband, each dining out with their respective boyfriend and girlfriend,” he says. “It can sometimes come down to timing and finessing everyone’s trips to the restroom. Luckily, we have two sets. And two exits to the restaurant, as well. A lot of it involves engaging one party in conversation for just the right about of time. It’s a performance.”
Greenlee says that during his Gotham years he actually had an RSS feed on his computer for news developments that helped him predict how to interact with a newsworthy customer on any given night. Was the woman in the low-cut dress the rumored partner in a just-announced financial merger, for example, or the consolation prize for a deal gone south?
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Sara Reistad-Long is a New York-based writer. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Esquire, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. She can also be found blogging at www.sveltegourmand.com, where she explores the intersection of health and delicious food.
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Sara Reistad-Long is a New York-based writer. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Esquire, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. She can also be found blogging at www.sveltegourmand.com, where she explores the intersection of health and delicious food.
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Sara Reistad-Long is a New York-based writer. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Esquire, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. She can also be found blogging at www.sveltegourmand.com, where she explores the intersection of health and delicious food.
ugh...sorry, I couldn't even finish more that one page of this masturbatory drivel. No wonder the wealthy are so out-of-touch - gated communities, obsequious underlings, kowtowing flackies, filtered everything. It's revolting.
masturbatory drivel. you've made my day! guillotine redux!!!
Life is a stage. I applaud good acting and find it comforting that smart waiters/bartenders/hotel managers know their lines and when to deliver. I am not condoning affairs, but I am also aware enough to know that they happen for respectable reasons that do not need to destroy everything in their path. I think we need to get a lot more sophisticated about relationships, and not claim intimacy because we have a title or a certificate. Intimacy is something we earn and are not entitled to. Shame on the person who is eager to catch their spouse...too much energy too late in the game.
Slow news day?? I couldn't finish it either.
I guess I'm supposed to be all mature and worldly and be amused, entertained, and even educated by all this. I guess I'm just not that sophisticated, because all I feel is disgusted and sick at heart. It's not so much the infidelity but all the deception and the cavalier way it's treated that make me want to take a shower.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
I agree.
or Lysol spray?
Yeah... Exactly. That's just what it often feels like, reading many of even the "mainstream" articles these days. It's like the sophisticated attitude is just to roll with it, to be impartial, totally objective to this sort of thing.
I don't find the article nor the concept the least bit amusing, entertaining, or sophisticated. And it makes me seriously question the Daily Beast for publishing this kind of garbage.
Come on tina! this is way over our head. i cant start my morning thinking about some dude who is worried he is going to mix it up. you know i think that david letterman's lifestyle is the norm in the big apples. get this off!
Ick. These men need to be taken to the vet and fixed, not protected with elaborate schemes involving all-staff memos and restroom choreography. The most shocking moment to me was the mention of the Spitzer scandal and what the hospitality industry has learned from it: to be MORE careful to protect the right of philanderers to operate with impunity. They must be kidding. This is pre-fall-of-the-empire morality. If these are truly the priorities of the elites, no one should be surprised at the state our country is in today.
Off with their heads, I say!
" ...he had an RSS feed for news developments that helped him predict how to interact with a newsworthy customer."
People who do that probably spit in your soup too.
Thanks but no thanks.
I can't believe I wasted my time reading this article.
The pompous, melodramatic prose seems to match the pompous melodrama of extramarital affairs. I have never understood why people find these affairs so appealing. Don't you want your life to have a little more meaning?
And having had an aloof, entitled, overprivileged father who refused to deal with his lowly children in a kind way, I can't help but think of all the harm they are causing to their children.
Ugh is right. Makes me glad I'm not rich. Money and power turns them into pigs who don't care who they hurt. But the "professionals" who support this behavior are no better.
It's good to know that I have a whole community that is available to help me in my endeavors. The previous comments are missing a very important aspect of this story. The gentlemen are keeping an entire industry thriving in uncertain economic times. If they didn't have a mistress to take out to dinner or on vacation, then he's only taking out his wife. He's contributing twice as much to the economy that the faithful husband is... Not to mention all the guilty gifts he has to buy for the wife and the therapy if he gets caught. We should ALL applaud these great patriots for what they're contributing to our country.
God bless America!
I was thinking: If instead of taking my wife to our favorite Burger King and show up at the counter with a buxom brunette not my wife, will the guys behind the counter start asking me if the wife died?
Later, will the manager of the burger joint come to our table and offer his condolences for my dead wife?
This, of course, sounds as dumb as the dutifully researched article by Ms. Reistad-Long.
Surely you don't mean to suggest that the "article" was a bunch of hastily improvised bullshit.
But I surely do, nortonclyburn
That was a super interesting & revealing article. Thank you
Sara Reistad-Long: Formally at Elle, and now blogging about her favorite scone recipes.
Stay tuned for more hard hitting articles!!
Oh, and I forgot about her brave program, called "Girls Write Now."
One can wonder, can't one, what type of writing comes out of those workshops headed by a scone-recipe/how-to-cheat-and-not-get-caught writer?
Sara: There really is a lot of good stuff out there worthy of writing about. You must try harder to find it. Nevertheless, it's out there, believe me. It really is!
Great tips, much appreciated. Remember ladies, if you won't do it at home he'll just go shopping somewhere else.
Well spoken by someone who takes his alias from a mythological hammer with a... short... handle. And to complete the mythological references, he's even a troll!
Wow. These are basically 5-star seedy dives, and their employees are basically pimps. Disgusting.
I'll take my provincial lifestyle, with no mistresses or secrets. Just a happy wife I adore (and who adores me), and a face I can look at in the mirror.
hilarious. and the reactions. especially drewfeels
Nothing in this article that I didn't already know about.
The real culprit here is ... money, greed.
Yes, people who want to make money will go to great lengths to earn some by catering to the foibles of rich people, even when that means aiding & abetting extramarital affairs. It's just human nature.
Disappointing? Sure. Surprising? Not one bit!
Self-absorbed imaginary bullshit? Absolutely.
This article is idiotic for the reasons mentioned above, but also because it's basically entirely wrong. If you are having an affair you can't bring your date to the Four Seasons, and this has nothing to do with how the staff treats you. Instead, you run the risk of running into colleagues and friends who aren't on any payroll and don't get any rss feeds on your dalliances. The only safe place to take a mistress in New York City is the TGIFridays at Times Square, because you know that not a single New Yorker will ever set foot in there.
I once had enough air miles to upgrade to a first class international flight (my first and only first class flight) where the seats were the size of roman baths. They seated us first and then everyone else had to march past us to get to the cattle cars in the rear. I was quite embarrassed as people were so obviously outraged at the size of the first class seats, but it then was funny when every third person made an indignant comment to the effect of, "Ugh, who would ever want to pay so much for these huge seats!" It was so dishonest on their part that I sat back for the rest of the flight and enjoyed the service, which was excellent. This article reminds me of that.
*LAUGHS* So you're saying that we're all jealous of not having a bunch of brown-nosing underlings who lie to our faces about how awesome we are and cover-up our extra-marital affairs. Your analogy of 1st-class vs. coach doesn't really make sense...there's a big difference between envy of nice seat/car/clothing/home etc, and spineless, greedy, suck-upitude for cash.
I used to own a high-end catering company and got out of the business due to my refusal to deal with the tantrums and overwheening mega-egos of many of the elite - especially CEO/CFO/Attorneys...they were the absolute worst. The wealthier scientists and MDs were some of my nicest clients.
great article! Brava Sara. Cheating too stressful
'Tis a wonderful fantasy for the rich. On the other hand, with COPD-filled lungs, I just wonder how much more harm Spitzer, Ensign, Sanford, etc. would have done to their families had they been smokers instead of adulterers. Yet no one other than the Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses thinks smoking to be sinful.
This article is so disgusting, I can hardly believe it's thrown out so nonchalantly on a news site. The Daily Beast has hit an all-time low. Is there no decency left?
This reminds me of an article in Time magazine a few months back about some website and iPhone application that will help adulterers cheat.
Now it's one thing to have exotic sexual preferences. What others like may not be my thing, like polyamory, for instance. I can accept that some people are comfortable with that. And vice versa-for instance, I'm a (strictly monogamous) homosexual. But can we not all agree that CHEATING on your significant other, behind their back is morally wrong? Seriously!
Are we so reactionary in our permissiveness that condemning, or at the very least not trivializing adultery is considered too judgmental?
I'd like more sordid details and I don't get all the negative reaction. People have been cheating for as at least as long as people have been marrying. And there is a class that can afford to pay for extra discretion. Is that supposed to come as a surprise or something? I've never been in the circumstances but it's nice to know that if I did cheat and had the money, the hospitality industry's silence can be bought. Hell, that's good to know for simple no-strings-attached dating!
Amen...
Dumb article....because it is wrong (as one other commenter noted) - you dont bring your affair partner to anyplace that you have, will or even might pass in your "regular" life. You pay cash whenever possible and you work as hard as you can to never let anyone who might know your spouse to know what you are doing - this includes, restaurant, hotel, and other staff....To do otherwise (like the idiots in this article) means that deep down you either want to get caught, or are cruel and really dont give a $hit about your spouse at ALL.
Thank you.
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